History (4,190 posts)

This article traces the rise in popularity of condom usage during the 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic in Australia’s most conservative state, Queensland. This research demonstrates the efficacy of grassroots activism and organisation in promoting condom use as a life-saving measure, despite government inaction. Centring the role of the condom, this article is the first history of policy surrounding condoms in 1980s Queensland, illustrating the moral and social anxieties that coalesced at state level around the condom, which came into conflict with federal, medical, community and (particularly notably) religious perspectives. With AIDS, the condom itself became a site of acute anxiety in that it simultaneously represented a medical act of prevention and a socially fraught sexual risk. Acceptance of the condom was fostered through educational campaigns by and for targeted communities and in direct opposition to abstinence advocacy espoused by the state government.

By 1914 frustrations had peaked in the suffrage movement, as the government refused to progress the issue of votes for women. Militant action increased, from the smashing of windows to arson attacks. Surveillance photographs were taken during suffragettes’ prison stays to keep a watch on those suspected of future militant activities. These were then circulated to prominent attractions, likely in response to the suffragette attack on the National Gallery’s ‘Rokeby Venus’.

The Kindred Spirits sculpture commemorates the 1847 donation by the Native American Choctaw Nation to Irish famine relief during the Great Hunger. It is inBailick Park, Midleton, Cork…. The stainless steel feathers honour an extraordinary act of solidarity in March 1847, when the Choctaw Nation gathered roughly $170 to help feed Ireland’s starving poor.

The childhood of the 1950s and 1960s was very different from that of children today. Mostly left to their own devices, and aided and abetted by downright dangerous toys, what could go wrong?

51 Portraits of Ravers at The Hacienda, 1991

This probing account shines a new light on the problem of anti-Asian violence and inspires us to build lasting solidarity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, racist demagoguery fomented a campaign of terror against Asian Americans. But these attacks were part of a much longer pattern that made anti-Asian racism integral to the outbreak of white supremacist, misogynist, and colonial violence across 175 years of U.S. history. Written in the radical spirit of Howard Zinn, American Peril represents the culmination of thirty-five years of study and activism by award-winning scholar Scott Kurashige.

Readers of Jon Stock’s new book The Sleep Room: A Sadistic Psychiatrist and the Women Who Survived Him (2025) will come away with a rather different impression of Sargant. He is, in my view, one of the great moral monsters of 20th-century psychiatry.

Organised crime has a long history in Australia. For more than a century, criminal groups have accumulated vast fortunes, committed countless acts of intimidation and coercion and, at times, extreme and spectacular violence. In the process, they have become a recurring feature of public concern, media sensationalism and political debate. There’s the razor gangs operating in Sydney during the 1920s, and the underbelly gangland conflict in Melbourne during the 1990s and early 2000s. Now we have the nationwide “tobacco wars”.

The pragmatism of the Milwaukee socialists was inseparable from the international world of socialism that they inhabited and helped to shape. Above: Milwaukee Mayor Daniel Hoan in 1930